


a place that I know well

by alessandriana



Series: days and weeks and months and years [1]
Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series, Torture, depressing shit, hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 04:17:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3515060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alessandriana/pseuds/alessandriana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a juvie that's supposed to specialize in kids with powers, they really haven't put much thought into the different nutritional requirements of the inmates.</p><p>He's hungry <i>all the time</i> here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a place that I know well

**Author's Note:**

> Please see the end notes for trigger warnings.

He's hungry _all the time_ here. No, seriously. He knows they say that about all teenage boys, but with him it's not a joke, it's just fact. Ever since his powers came in, he's had to keep eating and eating just to keep functioning. 

The tests don't help-- running on a treadmill for hours straight as they test the various aspects of his speed burns a lot of calories-- but at least then they feed him extra to make up for it. It's the days in between that are the worst, when he's limited to regular mealtimes and they only allow seconds, not thirds, and it's this gross glop, worse even than high school cafeteria food-- it's supposed to be "healthy" but all that really means is that there's a lot of vegetables and rice rather than anything with serious calories to it. For a juvie that's supposed to specialize in kids with powers, they really haven't put much thought into the different nutritional requirements of the inmates. 

Maybe it would be easier if Tommy's mutation were something visible, like Fish-Face over in cell 24B (real name Terrence); he at least gets a mix of some sort of weird guppy food or whatever and he seems happy enough with it. As much as you can tell for a guy that's part fish, anyways. Management seems to think the power dampeners ought to also reduce Tommy's appetite back to base normal but they don't, they really don't, he's not just saying that to make trouble. After the fifth or sixth day he asks for more food (or, okay, tenth or twentieth; Tommy isn't so good at knowing when to stop) and gets shot down, he finally gives in and learns to live with the hollow emptiness under his ribs and the faint, persistent lightheadedness. 

He develops strategies to manage it. He hangs out in his room in the evenings instead of going out to the common area; stops using the gym (he gets plenty of exercise during the tests, but there's something to be said for the simple motion of lifting and releasing a weight, so different from running); learns the ins and outs of the black market, so he can trade rich kid Jenny in 9A the cigarettes he gets from Lisa in 16B (who gets them from one of the guards) for whatever's cheap and high cal she can buy from the commissary with the money her parents send her.

His parents don't send him money. His parents don't send him anything. Ever since his powers came in a year ago, his parents have done their absolute best to pretend he doesn't exist. When he got shipped over to one or the other for visitation he'd hear them arguing about who was responsible for the grocery bills in vicious whispers, but they'd never once mentioned it to his face. (At least they did keep feeding him, however much they begrudged the expenses. They always had been good at walking the line between neglect and outright abuse.) Now that he's in here, and they're not even legally required to be responsible for his survival, he hasn't heard a peep out of them. 

His grandma, his dad's mom, comes to visit once. (They don't usually allow visitors; too much chance someone is going to blab about the treatment they get, but they can't totally cut them off without too many questions being asked, so instead they threaten him with spending the entire rest of his sentence in solitary if he breathes a word to her, and Tommy has been here long enough to know it's not an idle threat.) 

He's not entirely sure why she bothers to visit; she's never liked him, and she spends the hour-long visit haranguing him about his powers, his poor life choices, how he's broken his poor parents' hearts... the list goes on. But it's no different from the usual crap he gets at Thanksgiving, and-- well, negative attention is still attention, as pathetic as that makes him sound. So he sits there and lounges back in his chair and pretends not to listen to her, and the day after she leaves, he finds fifty bucks have been loaded onto his commissary account. He makes it last for nearly a month. 

Even with the extra food, he loses weight. Muscle builds up from all the running and fat percentage goes down, not that there was much of it to begin with-- he's always been lean as a greyhound, his mother would say (before she stopped saying anything about him at all). He gets weighed every time he goes in for an experiment, but the weight loss is gradual, and no one seems to put together a quarter pound here, a half a pound there. When he looks at himself in the polished steel fake-mirrors around this place, he can see the hollows in his cheeks, the dark smudges under his eyes, but no one else seems to notice. 

It goes on like this for a long time. On the bad nights, he dreams he wastes away to nothing while they argue about who gets to run experiments on his corpse. 

Things finally come to a head nine months into his five-year sentence. He's in solitary-- again-- because of a stupid fight; some idiot who thought that because Tommy was scrawny he was an easy target. (They were probably still stitching the guy up in the infirmary; Tommy might not have his speed, but the four iron nails held clenched between his fingers do plenty of damage on their own.) 

The main benefit of solitary is that Tommy can lay curled up on his bunk and not have to deal with the crap from all the other inmates; the downside is he's cut off from both the commissary and his other sources, and his food is delivered to him on a tray with no chance for seconds. Nearly a week passes like this before it comes time for his usual appointment with the doctors-- not even being in solitary gets him out of that particular obligation-- and by then he's so hungry that it doesn't even register as hunger, just a sick nausea. He thinks if he saw a tray of food he wouldn't even be able to eat it, just throw it back up. He has no energy and the thought of being subjected to hours of testing makes him want to crawl under his bed and never come out, but it's not like he's given a choice. The guard slaps the power dampener cuff around his left wrist, jerks him up with a tight hand around his upper arm, and Tommy is dragged along behind him along the blank, white halls. 

The smell of antiseptic fills his nose and mouth as he's led into the room and he has to breathe through his mouth to keep the bile down. The much-abused treadmill sits in the center of the room; he can't count the number of times he's burned out the treads or overloaded the mechanisms. Every time he hopes that will be it, and every time they manage to fix it somehow. Or maybe they're just buying a new treadmill each time. He wouldn't put it past them. Someone with deep pockets is bankrolling this place. They have to bribe the local politicians with something to keep this place quiet, after all. 

He gets too depressed if he thinks about that, though, so he stops.

He lets himself be led through the usual preparations; he changes into workout clothes and they attach a heart monitor to his chest and electrodes to his temples. This time they're apparently monitoring the changes in the neurotransmitter levels in his blood as he runs, so they take three vials of blood before they even start. He takes the water offered afterwards and gulps it down, and it helps to push back the hunger and incipient lightheadedness somewhat. He wishes it were something, anything else.

Finally his power dampener is turned off, and for a moment, one shining moment, the world is the right speed again. Everyone around him is so, so slow. In that moment, as he looks around the room, at the doctors clustered by one of the banks of computers, at the three guards by the door clutching machine guns, he knows with utter certainty he could kill everyone in this room and be out the door before the first drop of blood had even hit the pavement. 

And a part of him really, really wants to do it. He can almost feel the sun on his face again, the wind, the freedom. He breathes in and can almost taste the fresh air. 

He lets himself indulge in the fantasy for a moment longer and then pulls himself back, an almost physical wrench. As good as it would feel, it would be pointless. The power dampener around his wrist is connected into the building's systems; it's set to trigger the second he passes out of this room, and he's fast, but he's not faster than the speed of light the electronics communicate at. (He knows that for a fact; he tried the first time he was brought here, and didn't get further than the the next room over.) 

Besides, whatever else he is, he's not a murderer. 

His shoulders slump, and he steps onto the treadmill. The tests begin.

Four-thousand miles and an hour later, give or take, and they let him take a break for a moment while they take five more vials of blood and swap out the treads on the machine. Four thousand miles is not a lot for him, but for some reason he's sweating more than normal, his pulse pounding loud in his ears, and he feels chilled to the core. When it comes time to get back on the treadmill, he barely makes it to his feet and has to lock his knees to keep himself from falling. It's easier once he's standing, though, and after a second-- and an impatient nudge by one of the scientists-- he makes his way back onto the treadmill. 

Seven hundred miles into the next batch and he's slowing down without even meaning to. His head is buzzing and the lights are too bright; he feels like he's floating somewhere above his body, looking down on the room below. He half-falls against the safety bar. 

"Get back on the treadmill, please, Thomas," one of the doctors says, approaching. "You haven't finished your tests." The 'please' is a mere formality, he knows, a preface to something worse, but Tommy can barely hear him over the ringing in his ears. He makes an aborted movement to follow the orders, then has to clutch at the bar as his knees turn to water. 

_"Now,_ Thomas," the doctor says warningly. 

"I'm trying," he says, but it comes out all slurred together, "m'tryin," and he's not sure if the doctor understands. His vision is sparkling around the edges, tunneling in. 

Abruptly he's sitting down on the side of the treadmill with no clear memory of how he got there. It feels awfully nice to be sitting down. It would be better, though, if he were lying down. So he does that. The tile is cool against his face. 

There are shoes in his peripheral vision, a pair of sneakers at the end of a pair of khaki pants and a lab coat. The edge of a hairy white leg is visible where sock meets pants. Tommy exhales the barest breath of a laugh, can't help it. 

The man attached to the shoes crouches down and rests two fingers against Tommy's neck with a suppressed sigh of exasperation. It's only lack of energy that prevents Tommy from hitting him. "Pulse is 60 bpm," he says. A beep, as someone waves a diagnostic device over him. "Blood pressure is 70/50, which is well below his normal of 110/75." There's a scratching noise, as someone writes those facts down. "This looks like the results of your experiment, Dr. Elgin?" 

"It certainly seems that way." Paper rustles, as the doctor with the clipboard flips through his pages and says, "One-hundred and forty-five days on a reduced calorie diet until collapse." 

Tommy can't breathe for the unexpected rage that fills his chest. It had all just been one long test? All those nights spent curled up on his bed, too hungry to fall asleep? All those days spent scrounging around for whatever food he could get? "Fucking assholes," he says into the tile, though no one seems to hear him. His fist clenches, ragged nails biting into the skin of his palm. If he could get up he would kill them all, and fuck the consequences. Tears of impotent fury prick at the corner of his eyes. 

"We'll have to calculate the total calories and number of miles run later," the man continues, oblivious to Tommy's reaction. "Dr. Richmond, you have that data, correct?" 

"It's on our spreadsheet, yes," Dr. Richmond says. "I'll have it to you by the end of the day."

"If we're not going to be able finish my experiment today, at least let me get the final blood test," says the doctor who was trying to make Tommy keep going, sounding peeved. "I don't know why you always insist on running these kinds of long-term tests; they interfere with my data."

"It's important to accurately gauge the stress tolerance of the subject--" the other breaks in, and their conversation devolves into an argument about whose experiment takes higher priority, even as the doctor kneels down and grabs Tommy's arm. 

The needle slips easily into his vein. Tommy doesn't hear the rest. 

***

He wakes up some indeterminate amount of time later curled on his side in a cot. The beeping of a heart monitor nearby means he's in the infirmary; the sticky, familiar pull of tape on his arm means he's got an IV in. Physically he feels at least somewhat better. Though he's still starving, his headache has receded and the weakness is disappearing as whatever is in the IV-- glucose, probably-- works its magic. 

He lays there and drifts on the edge of falling back asleep. It's quiet aside from the heart monitor. Nice, almost. He can practically imagine he's in bed at home, some Saturday morning in his long-distant childhood when things were still good; his parents downstairs, making breakfast together for the three of them. If he pretends hard enough, the footsteps of an approaching nurse become the footsteps of his mother coming up the stairs to wake him up. 

There's a click as the nurse sets something down on his bedside table. The smell of coffee fills the air. His stomach growls, but he squeezes his eyes shut and ignores it, keeping the fantasy going for as long as he can. In his head, it's a tray of waffles smothered in maple syrup, with eggs and bacon heaped on the side, and a full mug of coffee steaming gently in the cool air. Voices nearby are his parents talking softly. 

He can only keep it up for so long, though. Soon enough the cracks start showing in his memories. The last time his parents made him breakfast was when he was maybe nine or ten-- and the last time they'd been able to speak to each other without arguing was nearly as long ago. He opens his eyes and sits up a little in bed to see what's on the tray. 

It's a bowl of thick, congealed oatmeal, a slice of bread with two little jelly packets, an anemic-looking orange, a cup of skim milk, and a mug of thin instant coffee. Nothing else. 

Tommy sinks back onto the bed, turning so his back is to the tray, and curls with his knees up to his chest. He isn't hungry.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Trigger warnings:** This story includes discussion of deliberate starvation/calorie restriction (forced upon the main character by others), the mention of a deliberate hunger strike, and mention of parental neglect. It's also just kind of depressing as hell, sorry. 
> 
> Originally written for the hc_bingo February Amnesty Challenge, with the prompts 'torture, dungeons and starvation'; then I realized that hurt/comfort generally requires, y'know, _actual comfort_ , and ended up writing a companion piece that gets into that. It should be up soonish. 
> 
> The title is from Annie Lennox's _Loneliness_.


End file.
